the quiet chaos driving me mad
by pondglorious
Summary: A sort of merging of show and book; picks up after Hannibal's arrest and his attack on Will and leads into Red Dragon. Very angst (but isn't it always with these two?) Basically me attempting to make my ship work in book canon.


**Author's Note: This basically only makes sense in my impossibly detailed headcanon which plays out as follows: After Will gets out of jail/Hannibal gets caught/Will gets attacked/he is released from the hospital, Will and Alana, whether or not they're already in a relationship, attempt to make things work between them but it's messy due to Alana's guilt and Will's trauma. Cue angst and bickering and depression as they love each other nonetheless and my heart breaks, leading to Will leaving for Florida and eventually marrying Molly, which is where he is by the time Red Dragon rolls around. He and Alana meet again when Jack convinces him to come back to the field for one more case. I guess I just told you the entire plot of the thing but I suppose you can just find a way to enjoy it anyways. Will POV and my first attempt at second person, so I apologize if something doesn't sound right. As always, please read and review :)**

* * *

It's a halting and aching sort of crumbling.

It wasn't always tragedy that wove you together with her; it was everything that bled through that. It was faith and gratitude and love, light and possibility. She saw the man in you behind the mind, she saw straight through the foggy empathy. She saw no cracks in the foundation of your being when all said you were broken, and with her, you felt somehow stitched together. She trusted you, explicitly, even when the murder charges weighed on you did not. She had enough faith in you to sustain an entire religion. She held your hand in the ICU and looked you in the eyes when no one else could. She fought for you with unrelenting vigor when most only watched the battle unfold. But it's hard to pay your debts to her in the midst of yet another war.

You are drawn to each other like the serpent and the apple, but you are perpetually condemned for the sin of disobeying the God that is Hannibal Lecter.

* * *

You drown in tragedy. You thrash in the water, try to keep your head level with the horizon line of the sea, afraid that the salt you taste on your tongue is blood, not ocean. She tries to grab your hands but they're so slippery, and when you finally latch onto a finger, you want to scream at her not to let go. But you hate being weak. Being helpless. You should have learned how to swim.

Instead, you drown just to keep your pride.

* * *

You suffocate on him; he smothers you even through the prison bars. Hannibal Lecter is on every television, every newspaper and magazine, the name on everyone's lips, he is disgusting pop culture and the echo of his ghost bleeding through the TV screen and headlines lets him destroy the very last thing you have left, until you have nothing, just like he hoped. He got what he wanted, you suppose. Even though it's your fault; like always.

* * *

Sometimes Alana takes your hand, or touches your cheek, or just _looks_ at you - and it softens all the frigid, solid hatred that makes ice blocks of your bones and you recall why you've made it as far as you have. It's these mundane moments of normalcy when you can drink in the strength she'd supplied for so long and it fuels the scrap that's left of everything you had.

But you both try to be strong for each other, but that just makes the breaking down even more unbearable when you do it alone. Then you lie together in the dark because there's nothing and too much to say, and your stoic figures and far-off eyes tell each other that neither of you are actually there. She is always edging away from you, sometimes by inches or minutes and gradually, by miles and miles and years and centuries that build up the void snaking between you.

* * *

She worries and worries and it just worries you away. She's always been a caretaker, a nurterer and she's always been too close with you and you don't know how you ever expected that to change. It's hard to pretend that you don't like being taken care of; but you also don't like being coddled, deemed incapable. Her deplorable concern is what causes her to suggest antidepressants, therapy, all the habitual motions that arrive in the aftermath of a tortuous ordeal such as yours. It makes you want to claw your eyes out, or maybe hers - and that notion just makes you want to claw your own out even more.

Why do you always have to be the sick one, the weak one? You always have to depend on medicine, on other people even as you push them away, on her. Weakness has become your default. Your mind has always been unravelling, weakening. It unravels your empathy, your love and your life. You are an empty shell of a person hoping that she will fill you up. You need her like you need air, but you don't want to. You want to want her and nothing more.

* * *

You wallow in your rage and self pity and pain and too easy to push away hers. It's easy to forget she has a world of demons of her own, that she fights them alone as she simultaneously fights yours. Her suddenly no longer being the strong one is jarring and shocking, and you don't know what to do. If you express the slightest grain of concern, she says something usually involving the indication she's a doctor and she takes care of herself. You wish you could be so self-sufficient.

Most afternoons she burrows in your sheets because she can't look at your face without knowing the hollowness in your eyes and the lumpy tarnished tissue at your hip is a result of the catapult she set in motion. You are almost glad you have an excuse to resent her like you resent everything else in this worn-out, freshly wretched world. The buzzing gossip at the newsstands are relentless and they give you even more of a reason; _rumored to have romantic affairs with both men involved_, they read with her name tacked at the front. It sickens you to think that _his_ hands, _his_ lips have been where yours have; a notion so gruesome that you have enough reason not look at her, either. It's ridiculous but it's enough to convince yourself she has secrets murky as your own. Enough to shroud the truth behind your averted eyes.

But there are times when, sheltered by the opaque night and made brave by her unconsciousness, you can lean over her sleeping figure and whisper into her hair: _If it could I could do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing._

And it will matter, in time.

* * *

There is an evening when, in the heart of the Virginian night, you walk across the flat fields surrounding your home with her, the same field you walked looking for the imagined animal, where she'd preached to you a prayer that still haunts you day and night: you're not broken. She'd asked you why you left the lights on in the house and you told her she'll see, but part of you is afraid she won't; that she won't see the boat rising out of the darkness that is the water, the same one you'd seen when you looked at her through her yellow-lit window and saved her from another one of Hannibal's schemes. But she does. _It's beautiful, Will,_ she murmurs, and you think of saying something earnest and cliche like _you're beautiful_ but instead you revel in the serene quiet. You hadn't expected that; you'd been worried bringing someone else here would ruin the effect because it's only ever been you here, but you are abruptly glad that you tugged her along. You feel the weight of her head on your chest and the howling of the dogs somewhere in the tall grass around you and want to bottle this moment and drink from it when it inevitably ends. _Let's stay here_, you think as you bury your face in the hair shrouding her temple,_ let's stay like this forever and forget about everything and everyone and be happy, just you and me. We wouldn't want anything or anyone else besides the dogs and each other._

You should tell her that, but you've got it down to a chronic science - evading honesty at every fleeting chance. Besides, happiness isn't something you can bargain for.

* * *

Sometimes that moment comes back to you in pieces, like scene transitions in a dream, all blurred and dim and whimsical, and you scramble to make out the hazy images and mold them into something clear and close and focused and not veiled by devastation. But it slips like sand through your fingers, and your hands are left empty.

That's just the way things are now.

* * *

Her words come back and stab like an army of daggers, harsh and mocking. You are both broken and hardly scrambling to pick up the pieces.

But there are times, rare and precious and almost too good to be true, when she laughs - the sound swelling and flaring up warm and sweet inside you, when she smiles - pierces you like blissful pinpricks and the image bleeds through even the intoxicating pain, and you remember what wholeness feels like. You'd do anything to keep those precious gestures of happiness. Instead, you elicit the opposite.

* * *

Alcohol and sex your most cherished weapons- tools of forgetfulness. Dusty, throbbing hangovers are your shields. One hazy morning your fingers splay against the light bruises at the tops of her thighs and you want to slam your head into the wall because you know you're the one who put them there; through the foggy haze you remember your hands tugging not so gently at the strands of her hair, rough hands and rough voice at her ear. You were powerful for once and you had drunk from her soul and taken and taken and she had sighed and hissed obscenities like it was bliss.

She cracks open an eye and watches you, tracing the tiny purple and blue splotches, tiny veins of blood that burst under her skin and defends it with some mumbled, offhand comment about not having a _problem_ with it. You do, because harshness is everything you stand against, because your eyes have always made everyone transparent and you know she wants you to treat her with coarseness both physically and verbally because that's what she feels like inside; coarse and beaten and shoddy. When you tell her this, she doesn't shoot up and tell you with unwavering vigor every reason why you shouldn't worry, like the Alana you know would have. She groans and buries her face in the pillow to evade the sunrise shooting through her headache like a knife and only says in groggy explanation; _I like things that leave a mark...that - that last_.

That is irony if you've ever encountered it - both of you know marks that last are grotesque and brutal scars, unfading wounds. You should say something about how things don't have to hurt to last, but that would be hypocritical. Isn't that what you're doing - making things hurt to see how long they could last? Testing the strength of what you have to see what it takes to falter?

* * *

You invest everything into her; your fear, your hopes, your guilt, your redemption. You wish you dreamt of her instead of _him_ and all his bloody elegance and operatic hymns of gore and lavish horror. But how could you even_ think_ of willing her into a nightmare?

(Oh, right. You're both already submerged in one - your lives.)

* * *

In the midst of other things said, Beverly tells you not to be stupid, and you say you aren't, but - but well, that's the simplest and most thoughtful advice you've ever heard.

Too bad you didn't listen.

* * *

It's all about catastrophe. It's about leaving. It's about suffocating, inescapable fear. Fear that; she will realize her mistake, the mistake that is _you_. Fearing the weakening feeling that you've never loved someone to such a staggering extent in your life, nor have you ever hurt someone so much. Even your murderous hands in the throes of your empathy feel like _nothing_ compared to the murder of her precious, ever-enduring affection. It sickens you because you know you will kill her. Not in the gruesome sense, the kind that you always fear. You will kill her with untruthful words and revelations and intangible wounds. You already feel like you are dead. She can't save you anymore because so is she. So really, what's one more grave in your world of graveyards- the grave that was you and her?

* * *

It's always about leaving. It's always about being apart, about instability, curiosity, murder charges, jail cells, linoleum knives keeping you that way.

You've spent so much time longing for each other, you forgot to learn how to _have_ each other.

* * *

You're developing claustrophobia. Everything screams your worst nightmares, everything you see and hear and smell and taste reminds you of your trauma until you want to let your lungs burst even though they're still fighting to breathe.

Her guilt hangs like a bad stench in the air and you choke on it and know there's nothing you can say or do to melt it away. It lays in your bed and makes your coffee and holds your hand and leaves possessions strewn around your home; a reminder. You snap at her that it's only this yet-again unpaid debt that keeps her from walking away. She just apologizes for suffocating you.

But it's more than guilt; you can't place why she stays when this is exactly what she'd evaded in a time that seemed like another life - this needy, unhealthy, precarious relationship with a man she'd labeled then, and still could now, _unstable_. You don't let yourself think for a second that is truly is because she loves you.

It is a game of russian roulette, this predicament of you and her, closing your eyes and taking the risk, waiting it out and listening to the cogs clicking in the killing device, reveling in the poisonous rush of knowing it's only a matter of time. Over and over and over you pull the trigger, until one day-

You pull it and the bullet kills you both.

* * *

You are selfish. You've spent so much time clinging to her and still push her away. You leave her before she has a chance to love you (no, before she gets a chance to leave you first). There was a time where you might have known and prevented the instigating departure, when you could have held her and cooed her own platitudes of unbrokenness, but woe has rendered you unempathetic. It makes no sense. But nothing about your life has ever had much sense. (She did. She gave sense to the horror and purpose to the tragedy and light to the end of the dark tunnel that is your life.)

You destroy her faith, her strength, her happiness, her _life_. But you don't apologize. You just leave.

And she watches you go.

(You destroyed all those things, but what hurts the most is that you can't destroy her love. Or yours.)

* * *

When you wake up screaming again, you reach out for her, seeking the infallible comfort she always serves and you are a man needy of a feast-

and then you remember that you are alone.

For many nights, you don't sleep. The cold space beside you is more haunting than your nightmares. Your last conversation, that eternal argument, the departing words play over in your head like a tape on a loop, and it's only the whiskey that quiets your mind; at least one thing hasn't changed. You preoccupy yourself with the unlikely possibility that, if you could have got it all out, all the verses of your devotion and your need, you might have even convinced your own stubborn self to stay. Now she'll never know, and for months afterwards this plagues you, the apparition of the irremediable.

* * *

You refused to forget the past, refused to stop fearing the future and rejections and obligations and guilt and debts never paid. You couldn't just forget these things, so you let them consume you, even though you could have done it; you knew both of you could forget these things and, with the unprecedented immenseness of the love between you, been with her like you should have.

* * *

It's almost ironic. You end up living on some sugar-coated island in Florida in a boatyard in a trailer, like you always planned before she gave you the possibility of a future. You fix boat motors and entertain the dogs with the sprawling stretch of beach in front of them and become a regular at a bar and it's refreshing for people to stare at you in inquisitive pity because you are a new broken man at the barstool instead of curiosity caused by the gun at your belt, in fear of your murder charges. You ignore them nonetheless. One night you meet a woman and you buy her a drink and you kiss her to forget like you usually drink to do the same.

You fall in love with Molly and all her blissful humdrum and enthralling banality, her lovely unknowing of instability and nightmares and killers and Hannibal Lecter. She knows nothing of that besides newspaper clippings and far away news reports and the scar at your hip. Eventually you have to tell her; but it's a confession irrelevant to _now_ and that is what she offers you.

But even if she is all these wonderful things, you just want Alana.

* * *

When you watch your bride walk down the aisle, you try to ignore the razor-toothed monster that bites into your already venemous psyche and hisses about mistakes, warns that this is one. Here is a wonderfully mundane, mousy-haired women who loves you; love her too, you tell yourself, but where is the woman you can't? You can't let yourself do what you did before. What you always do: ruin everything.

Now you're scolding yourself for sending Alana that flowery invitation and giving into the hope that she would come. But she isn't here, and you're glad. Why would she come to an event that to every other gushing, jovial guest is a wedding, but to both of you is a funeral? Why dig up that grave if the bones were already protruding from the dirt, a skeleton threatening to awake and walk once again? Seeing her face could have granted you strength to go through with this; it could have had you falling on your wayward knees at her feet. You can't take that chance.

But you keep expecting to see her shining black hair under the sheen shroud of the veil, feel the contours of her spine when your hands find the small of another woman's back, hear her laugh, a lovely staccato burst in the midst of the music, see her soft pink lips lifting themselves to yours as she teeters on the edge of her toes. You miss having to lean down to accommodate, to meet her halfway like you should have.

That night, you try to forget what her hair looked like against your sheets; a stroke of flowing, shining black paint against a white canvas. Her skin; pink and silky and quivering at your touch.

* * *

You see her again under the harsh lights of the forensics lab, but neither of you are looking, once again, at the desecrated corpse between you. Just like old times. You don't speak, don't think, can't feel the coiled knot of dread and worry that_ should_ be curling around your gut. This doesn't feel like opening old wounds. This feels like mending the ones you could never quite convince yourself had healed.

You are reliving the concept of silver linings.


End file.
